Workshop and Presentation / “Creative Destruction Consultancy”

For its project for the New Museum’s 2013 IDEAS CITY, Cabinet magazine has offered its booth to representatives from the Institute for Creative Destruction. The institute, which traces its roots to the work of the Cold-War Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, works in various ways to support research, teaching, and innovative thought at the fertile junction of innovation and annihilation. In what ways can disruptive forms of ennervation and excess be assimilated to orderly production? How can unpredictable and destructive insurgencies generate positive ROI? What is the best way to yoke degenerative autolytic processes to dynamic growth? These are the questions that motivate the thinkers associated with the Institute, and these are the problems that guide its diverse range of creative and destructive efforts.

The most significant public face of the Institute is its consulting agency, the Creative Destruction Consultancy (“Where the end is always a means”). This is a unique consultancy, grounded in the ecstatic traditions of the avant-garde, which specializes in delivering carefully aimed blows to complicated organizations, the kind of interventions that can bring out an institution’s natural and generative healing processes.

The CDC’s dynamic engagement staff has an extensive background in performance art, ludic activism, and parodic mischief, and decades of experience orchestrating subtle and unpredictable insurgencies in companies small and large.

The enormous range of untapped resources for creative destruction represent a vital future resource, as representatives of the IDC will demonstrate at the 2013 IDEAS CITY Streetfest. Come and learn (and even volunteer). Consider bringing documents or other material in need of generative obliteration.